In just a few days from now, we’ll reach the one-year anniversary of the Downadup/Conficker threat’s April 1, 2009 trigger date, and just like last year, April Fool’s Day will likely pass without seeing the Internet come crashing down.

At the same time, Symantec says Conficker continues to spread, whether we know what its creators had in mind for an end-game or not.

It is believed that the criminals behind Downadup/Conficker still have the keys to some 6.5 million of these computers, which have not been fixed by their owners, leaving them open to be victimized at any time by cybercriminals.IT is being seen that the .A and .B variants of the worm continue to spread, albeit at a much reduced rate.

According to Symantec, the infected PCs are being “very closely monitored” by law enforcement and the members of the Conficker Working Group, so even though several million PCs remain vulnerable, all the attention is “likely [to] prevent [Conficker's creators] from further playing out their original criminal plans.”

Huawei has achieved the world’s fastest LTE-advanced downlink speeds of up to 1.2 Gb/s. The demonstration utilized the company’s SingleRAN prototype LTE-advanced solution with 80 MHz multi-carrier wideband radio and included following features: carrier aggregation (CA), 4×4 multi-input multi-output (MIMO), coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) and relay.

Huawei’s LTE-advanced technology enables future development of LTE for operators and hopes to provide unparalleled mobile broadband experiences for consumers. The record speeds, which are more than 40 times faster than existing commercial 3G networks, are expected to revolutionize user experience by meeting bandwidth requirements of data-heavy applications.

Apalya’s MiMobiTV, the official mobile TV partner of IPL 2010, has witnessed a jump of 32 percent in its subscriber base in just 15 days. The number of MiMobiTV subscribes is currently at 1,325,000.

Amongst the most vibrant users of the mobile TV service has been the 3G segment, which has shown 500 percent growth with substantial higher viewership time per match. This re-enforces the value of relevant and engaging content for the success of 3G.

Apalya has also launched the service on iPhone and is now available as a part of the App Store. Installing the iPhone App users can enjoy live streaming across 3G / WIFI Networks. The app is available as “DLF IPL Live Streaming from Apalya” or “Apalya TV” on the app store for $4.99 (Approx Rs 225).

Transcend has announced a radical redesign of its 2.5-inch solid state drives (SSD). The updated SSDs now has an improved outer casing and additional tamper-resistant features, making them reliable and secure alternatives to conventional hard disk drives.

The updated SSDs are made of high-quality plastic material for improved appearance and lasting durability. The newly designed cases are lighter than their predecessors, making them perfect for thin and lightweight computers such as laptops and netbooks.

Theses SSDs provide instant access speeds, large storage capacity, high reliability, low power consumption and good shock resistance.

Novell is offering Novell Cloud Security Service (NCSS), a Web-based identity and access management solution for cloud service providers in India. NCSS will allow SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers to offer their enterprise customers the ability to deploy their existing identity infrastructure in the cloud.

With NCSS, currently in private beta but scheduled for release in mid 2010, the company is targeting cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Verizon and many some Indian cloud service providers such as Ramco Systems.

The development for NCSS began about 6 months ago and Novell R&D centre in Bangalore has developed a significant share of this product on the cloud platform along with other R&D centres.

Novell says security can be operated at a number of levels in cloud computing. The first level of security would be how and where data is deployed in a typical workload, data typically being the most sensitive element of any workload.

From Novell’s view, a security policy can be embedded into the workload, and through using orchestration management tools, ensures that the workload is only deployed on hardware or in locations that meet the security policy.

At another level, the company sees a federated-style user access being the key to reducing complexity.  The application or service owner can use the same authentication and authorization as the client uses today, thereby not having to maintain a separate set of identities. It also allows the client to make changes to a security policy, and it will adhere to the changes, regardless of where the workload might be running in the cloud.

It may not have been popular, or even easy, but the simple fact that a PS3 could boot and run Linux was a pretty awesome, one that will sadly be phased out on April 1st. According to the official Playstation blog April fools day will mark the release of Firmware version 3.21, and the death of the “install other OS” option on non slim PS3’s.

Sony wasn’t really specific as to why support for such a long-standing feature was being dropped, but like everything that’s hard to explain “Security concerns” was picked as a blanket excuse.

April fools day is a terrible occasion to try and convince people you’re making a serious announcement, but the fact that they released this statement a week earlier makes it look like they are serious.

Will you miss Linux support on your PS3?

Following an expensive acquisition (Sun Microsystems) and battling both IBM and SAP in the markets, Oracle still managed to post an impressive profit of $1.19 billion, or 23 cents per share, for the quarter ended February 28.

SAP’s most recent quarter was the best quarter of their year, only down 15%, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21%. But SAP is well ahead of them in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while they had only one.

Not entirely surprising, Oracle’s quarterly profit did slip by 11 percent as a result of its digestion of the $7.4 billion deal to bring Sun into its ranks. But according to Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer Jeff Epstein, the acquisition also added $458 million in revenue to the company’s bottom line.

They claim that the Sun integration is going even better than they expected.

Microsoft is no stranger to lawsuits, but the most recent case to cross the legal desk in Redmond seems to be really negligent on Microsoft’s side. A new patent infringement case has been filed in a Wisconsin U.S. District Court which alleges that the Zune’s “Buy from FM” service violates IP owned by Dr Edward Yavitz. The good doctor claims that even though he contacted Microsoft several times regarding the infringement, his plea’s for a peaceful resolution landed of def ears.

Patent trolling is considered somewhat of a nuisance in the tech industry, but you have to feel for the guy when you consider that he filed the patent in question years before there was even an iPod.Assuming that Dr Yavitz has a case here, this lawsuit could get mighty expensive if Microsoft’s new mobile platform actually takes off, with him claiming that the mobile is more Zune than Windows.

Microsoft officials declined to comment on the suit, or its merits, but when is that ever not the case?

AOL Inc. and its subsidiary Patch Media Corporation announced the launch of Patch.org, a charitable foundation to support crucial access to trusted local news and information in underserved communities. Patch.org will partner with community foundations and other organizations to launch Patch sites and bring objective local news and information to communities and neighborhoods around the world that lack adequate news media and online local information resources.

Funding and other support will sustain local sites modeled on AOL’s growing hyper-local Patch platform, now available in 41 U.S. communities. For each of the sites launched through Patch.org, a professional local journalist will produce original objective news and information about the area and curate user-contributed events, announcements, photos and video. Patch.org will also consider funding and partnership requests for other appropriate projects.

Any profits derived from Patch.org-funded sites will be returned to the communities they serve.

Patch.org will be managed with the support of Patch Media. A board of directors will be formed for the Foundation that will include leaders in media and community organizations to oversee Patch.org’s work. The charitable foundation will operate in conjunction with Patch’s Give 5 program, which donates advertising space and employee volunteer time to charitable organizations in local communities.

Microsoft’s pledge to allow easier access to rival browsers in Windows by the middle of May, ended a long antitrust dispute with the European Union.The company has started to send a choice screen, where consumers can easily click on rival browsers, to almost 200 million old and new computers.

Internet Explorer’s share of all Web surfing has in March dropped in France by 2.5 percentage points from February, in Britain by 1 percentage point and in Italy by 1.3 points.

Norway’s Opera Software, the fourth largest browser firm, has seen downloads more than double in Europe from normal levels due to the choice screen, with downloads in Italy, Spain and Poland more than tripling.

Also No 2 browser firm, Mozilla, says it has seen strong growth. SInce the Ballot Choice screen rolls out across all countires Mozilla is expecting to an increase.

Smaller Web browsers have urged the European Union to push Microsoft to provide them more visibility in its browser choice website.

At first sight, Microsoft’s browser Choice Screen shows its own Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Apple Inc’s Safari and Google Inc’s Chrome. It is not immediately obvious remaining choices are available by scrolling to the right of the Web page.

Microsoft has said the screen complies with the EU’s decision. The five largest browsers show directly on the Choice Screen, but smaller vendors say there is nothing to show consumers that more options are available.